Author Archives: Daniel Karasik

last night i had planned to go out to a party but then felt instead like just boarding the subway & riding & riding with my body quiet & deep in a book but it’s hard to find quite the resolve to do that so i went to the party & did what i could […]

a tiny shiver of messianic time for Shabbat: imagine there were no oppression to produce our identities. no homophobia or compulsory cisheterosexuality to produce some of us as queer, no racism to produce some of us as racialized, just millions of forms of descriptive difference not essentialized & politicized by violence. when we said “i” […]

oft adding “man” and “dude” to the end of greetings, men are very insistent that you, too, be a man, as if this makes it more certain that they, too, are men, that all maleness’s borders are defended — the way a flagging imperial army warns its soft cadets against desertion

the just telos of any institution that is a flower or arm of an unjust system is to turn itself into a challenge to that system the just telos of any institution that is the bloom or hand of an unjust system demands it risk institutional self-subversion

1) what is this system of behaviour, i do not understand it & all my intuitions seem wrong 2) i shall study this!! 3) i have systematically theorized the norms & values of this system and will act in accordance with them, even at the expense of other norms & values i have previously theorized […]

socialism as narrative project: to find & speak the unity in the single-issue activisms liberalism makes visible, each one of which alone leads to despair; to abolish itself as author, insisting the actors in the tale reclaim it, since it’s theirs

child abuse language is domestic abuse language is online shaming language is cop language is dad language is i’m warning you language is don’t make me tell you again is consequences language is punishment language is the prison guard’s language and we learn it early is the torturer’s language don’t say i didn’t warn you […]

shout out to anyone who dotes daily on the newer trauma because that means the older trauma can stay buried, irradiating the neighbourhood, though sometimes when you walk the new trauma it drags you to the old burial place & scratches & claws & scratches, almost helping you make a connection you almost make

nice National Poetry Day you got there, would be a shame if Poetry were that which refuses the Nation even while sometimes expressing it & that which contests the logic of Days as experienced within capitalism’s evacuated time

i turned my website which used to house Opinions into a place only for Poems!!! collected here are fifteen faves among the little prose poems or meditations or whatever that i’ve been posting on my facebook so can’t submit to Official Publication Places elsewhere, and possibly wouldn’t even want to, but perhaps you’ll find some […]